The telecommunications market is seeing a lot of action in terms of SD-WAN development and deployment, but how much to this point is just hype?
On this week’s NFV/SDN Reality Check we speak with John Isch from Orange Business Services Network and Voice Center of Excellence to discuss the software-defined wide area network market.
Telecommunication operators are quickly coming around to the notion that they can garner greater efficiency and agility from their network deployments by tapping into virtualization platforms like software-defined networking and network functions virtualization. This can be seen by the strong push from operators into deploying SDN and NFV to gain more control over those network assets.
The agility aspect of these deployments are also allowing operators to provide new services to customers that take advantage of these virtualized platforms, with SD-WAN services a topic that has seen a lot of interest from operators and lucrative enterprise customers.
However, getting a handle on just what operators are offering in terms of SD-WAN services to customers is still up for debate as the nascent nature of the market allows for only small comparison sets between offerings.
In terms of market focus, Isch said much of the SD-WAN focus today is in North America, with less seen from customers in Europe. This has been highlighted by the number of North American operators that have rolled out SD-WAN platforms over the past six months, including AT&T and Sprint.
Isch also cautioned that while SD-WAN can provide benefits for enterprise customers, there are still issues with current platforms that those customers need to think about before taking the plunge. Those include the potential for less control over their entire network operations as SD-WAN intelligence is typically confined to the edge of a network; cost-saving claims are often overstated, especially in cases where sourcing internet connections for international locations is needed; there remains a lack of quality of service control for latency and jitter in deployments; and many SD-WANs use proprietary protocols, which means companies can be stuck with the vendor they choose, with no degree of interoperability and the need to run multiple orchestration tools to cover all enterprise solutions.
While the audio and video quality of the interview is a bit rough in spots, we think you can get a good understanding on Isch’s view on the topics.
Isch also joined us for an unrelated webinar looking into the open source software space, where he provided his views on the topic of how the telecommunications industry is adapting to open source software platforms and the potential challenges they might offer.
Thanks for watching, and make sure to check out our next NFV/SDN Reality Check when we catch up with Metaswitch Networks for its views on the evolving cloud, NFV and SDN space.
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